


Young and Able

by Hth



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alice saves him or something I dunno, Character Death Fix, M/M, Post-Episode: s04e13 No Better To Be Safe Than Sorry, Quentin Coldwater Lives, how? who the hell cares, it's magic they use magic okay?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:15:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23693746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: Eliot's second life starts on a rough note, but gets better fast.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 45
Kudos: 284





	Young and Able

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I'm writing this story called All the Comforts of Home, which is a Mosaic story, and while I think it's very lovable in its own right, I do concede that it's also -- kind of brutally depressing, since it's built on this assumption that 4X05 happened, and the shadow of that is pretty long over the whole story. But! I always vaguely figured that at some point after 4X05 things got better, and that 4X13 definitely isn't a thing, because fuck 4X13 right in its ear. So All the Comforts of Home had this, like, phantom happy ending? And this week I needed to write a happy ending, so now it is no longer a phantom, it exists in the manifest world!
> 
> Long story short, if you'd like to read All the Comforts of Home, I think it's worth reading, BUT it really isn't mandatory to appreciate this story, which is really just a straight-up fixit of the type at which we Magicians fans fucking excel, because the alternative is madness.
> 
> This one isn't madness, this is very nice. Title from The Highwomen's "Crowded Table."

He wakes up once, probably too early. The room is too bright, and he's high, high, high.

Everything hurts. He should probably tell someone about that, but he just doesn't feel. Very motivated. To do anything.

They've got him on the really good stuff.

Gradually, over eight or ten or fifty long hours, Eliot manages to roll his head all the way to the right, where a slash of bubblegum pink gradually resolves itself into Margo. Her head is lolled forward, and for one minute Eliot feels like he's sinking through the floor, because she looks like a broken doll. She looks like a corpse.

Trick of the light. She's just sleeping. Eliot's hand twitches; the room has the too-brightness of a hospital, so shouldn't there be like – a button to push? Some way to let someone know that he's....

Except that he's not.

The last thing he hears is Margo's voice calling his name. She sounds just awful.

He dreams about a leaf. He twists the stem between his fingers, and he knows he could crush it in his fist but he doesn't. It's dead anyway. The ones on the ground are always dead.

It's beautiful.

He wants to tell someone about the beauty. He feels like – he was supposed to tell someone when he found it, but he can't remember who.

When he wakes up again, his face is an ugly-cry mess of tears and snot and when he licks his lips, he knows he can taste blood in the cracks. He tries to lift his hand and he can't quite manage it.

“Hey, hey, hey,” a woman says. It's probably supposed to be soothing, but actually she sounds terrified. He can't make any sense out of anything, except that she's not Margo. “Eliot, it's okay,” she says, two small hands gripping his forearm. “You're okay.”

“Margo,” he says. She's not Margo.

From down the hall, he can hear the _bang bang bang_ of stack-heeled boots, getting closer. Coming faster.

He smiles. There's blood on his tongue. Margo.

The last thing he feels is Margo's hands on his unshaven face, Margo's forehead pressed against his. The last thing he hears is Margo's voice. “You cock,” she says raggedly. “I leave for five minutes and you come back for fucking Quinn? I was gonna be all tender and shit.”

“Could still give it a try,” he says, before he blacks out.

He dreams about a turquoise ceramic square. It's broken in half, two lightning-jagged pieces of it in his hands, and he's afraid.

He can't remember why he's afraid, he just – is.

Why is he? Why is he ever?

Why has he always been? Eliot can't remember a time before the fear.

In the dream, strong hands cover his, and a voice says, _I can fix this, okay? Let me fix it._

No, Eliot tries to explain. It can't be fixed. It's broken. Throw it out, it's broken.

Look what he did, look what he did, that's not a toy Eliot, you shouldn't have been playing with it and now it's broken and it can't be fixed, why are you crying? No, you should've thought of that before you touched what doesn't belong to you. Jesus Christ, will you _stop crying_?

Because it's Brakebills instead of a hospital, they let him wear his own robe – well, his new robe, a gift from his friends, black and gold with crowns worked into the print. Very regal. “It's to help you get your game face back on,” Margo explains while she leans on the arm of his bed, patiently feeding him ice chips. “When you're back at your fighting weight, we're gonna have to re-conquer Fillory, you know.”

“You say that like we conquered it once,” he says. “Also, I don't have a fighting weight. I'm a man of peace, Bambi. Like the French.”

“Well, still,” she says with a little half smile. Her hair is in a braid; Eliot's never seen it like that before. “We're a team. I conquer, you-- do whatever it is you do. Seduction? Espionage? Kill 'em with kindness?”

Eliot nods and parts his lips for more ice. Right now he can't actually even walk, so it's all pretty hypothetical.

Nobody's told him very much yet, except that Margo drove the Monster out of his body with an enchanted axe, and that yes, that was accomplished exactly the way you'd think things are accomplished with magic axes.

“You don't remember anything at all?” Margo asks him for the thousandth time.

He remembers – feelings, mostly. Anger. Loneliness. Surprise. Desire. But like – different from the way that he normally experiences those feelings. It's nothing that he can explain.

“I told you,” he says. “I was in a – like a memory world. Just. The PKC, mostly. Some other parts of campus. I think it was supposed to keep me happy and out of its way. His way. The-- you know.”

She snorts a little. “Nice little vacation you took while the rest of us were busy kicking ass, you lazy bitch.”

“Any chance I get,” Eliot says.

He's seen Margo and Alice and Dean Fogg. Penny once.

He hasn't seen--

He hasn't asked, either. Eliot doesn't remember much, but he remembers enough to guess why – not everyone would want to see him.

Every time he falls asleep, he dreams about looking down at his hands and seeing them wrapped around Quentin's throat. It's a memory, he thinks. He has a few of those.

When he wakes up, it's just a memory of a dream, and all he really has is – feelings. Desire. Need. Jealousy. Obsession.

But like – different from the normal way.

The morphine makes it all feel like forever. He's surprised when he asks, and he's only been out of surgery for a day and a half.

Time is a real clusterfuck right now.

When isn't it?

When they let him look at himself in a mirror, he's surprised to see that his beard is coming in brown instead of gray. That's a little bit funny, but he can't explain the joke to anyone.

For supper on the second day, they send him a bowl of beef stew and a cup of sliced peaches in thick syrup. Eliot cries for an hour.

_Jesus Christ, will you stop crying?_

He only stops when Margo comes back, still damp from her shower. “What do you need?” she says, sitting back down beside him.

“What've you got?” he says. She rolls her eyes, and then she bends almost double at the waist, leaning down to balance her wet head lightly on Eliot's arm. He closes his eyes and counts his breaths, in and out. “I love you,” he finally says. Margo picks her head up to look at him, and he rushes to say, “But don't-- You don't – have to. Make a big deal about it.”

“Okay,” she says softly, and lays her head down on his body again. Her hand wraps around the back of his hand.

He dreams about sitting by a campfire, under the stars. He's playing guitar – or, no, smaller than a guitar, like a banjo or a ukulele or something.

He doesn't play guitar or banjo or ukulele in real life. In the dream he does.

_No, no_ , Margo says, wrapping her hand around his. _Here, closer – smaller, like this_.

_Okay, my hand doesn't do that_ , he says. _See? They're too big_.

_Eliot, you're not even trying_ , Margo says, stifling a laugh.

_Trying to – have smaller hands?_ Eliot drawls in disbelief.

He can hear Quentin laughing in the dark, giddy and tipsy. Margo tosses her red hair out of the way – _red hair?_ – and pushes his fingers tighter against the neck of the--

His fingers tighten

around the neck

around the neck

and it's dark

his hands are too big

around the neck

His hand is trapped and he can't get it back, can't get control over

and the fire and the fire and the fire and Quentin stops laughing and he says _I will die trying to burn you to the ground_ in a voice like he's not just angry at Eliot like usual, like he really _hates_ Eliot this time, this time for real, for good, forever.

Eliot's hands clench down harder, and everything goes black.

Even before he opens his eyes, he knows he's managed to sleep through the night this time. He can feel the morning light streaming in, warming one side of his face, one of his arms where it rests on top of the sheet.

He opens his eyes and lets them adjust to the light. He's thirsty. When he turns his head, the chair – Margo's chair – that's been pulled up to the side of his bed all this time is pushed against the far wall instead, and even though Eliot blinks a few times to make sure it's not just a trick of sleep and hope and time, nothing changes. It's Quentin, frowning softly as he reads on his phone.

Eliot has a very small window here, to come up with something rakish and charming and memorable to say. He tries, but he's not – at his fighting weight, quite yet. In the end, all he manages to say is, “Good morning.”

Quentin's head snaps up, and for a moment Eliot's not sure--

“Hi,” Quentin breathes out, soft and weak and relieved. “How are you, El?”

“I'm good,” he says. He's smiling, too. He wants to laugh, but he doesn't know if his stitches can take it. “I'm good, I'm – glad to see you.”

Is that too much? It makes Quentin duck his head awkwardly. Maybe it was too much.

Eliot thought maybe he could work up to the apology, but in retrospect, he probably should've led with it instead.

“Yeah,” Quentin laughs shortly. “Well, I'm – glad to be here.” He reaches out beside him for a piece of metal against the wall, pulls it around in front of him and unfolds it before using the walker to lever himself carefully out of the chair. Eliot watches in mute horror as Quentin makes his clumsy, laborious way across the room to Eliot's bedside.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Eliot says.

Quentin looks surprised. “Nobody told you?”

In _retrospect_ , Eliot really should've asked. “I've been in and out a lot,” he mutters instead.

“Well, I kind of, uh – dematerialized,” Quentin says. “For a minute or two.”

It's a weird feeling, packing the beginning, middle, and end of a motherfucking panic attack into a couple of breaths. “That--” Eliot says hoarsely. He clears his throat and tries again. He's really thirsty, are they bringing his orange juice soon? “That sounds not ideal. Whose plan was that?”

“Mine,” Quentin says easily. “I don't know, _plan_ might be a strong word. It all went down pretty fast.”

Eliot knows how to decode that. He knows that Quentin jumped on some kind of goddamn grenade, and that-- Eliot's been so fucking concerned about himself that he never thought – thought that he could come home and still not--

Still never be able to come home.

Christ, he's fucked everything up so badly, and he has no idea how to fix it. He has so much to apologize for. He's the cause of so much destruction and – and he almost _got Quentin killed_ , and – he broke Quentin's heart, probably more than once.

Everything is so _broken_ , and it's all Eliot's fault.

All he can say is, “But you're okay now?”

Quentin's walker comes bumping up against Eliot's bed. Quentin folds his arms and leans his weight down on the metal bar, closer to Eliot but still too far for what Eliot really wants, which is to reach out and run his fingers through Quentin's hair. It's shorter than Eliot remembers. “I'm here,” Quentin says. “And so are you, finally.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says. “Did I miss anything good?”

“Oh, you know,” Quentin says. “ _Community_ is on Netflix now, that's really cool. Love that show.”

“Is that so?” Eliot says, hazarding a smile.

“Mm,” Quentin says. “And I hear you've got a real sexy scar now.”

Eliot smiles in earnest. “You can thank Bambi for that. Q, there's.... We have so much to talk-- I have so much. That I want to say to you.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “Yeah, well. We have time, okay? I want you to get well first.”

Eliot's no medical professional, but he has lived in this body for an indeterminate but significant number of years, and he's pretty sure that's a time-frame he's not willing to live with. “At least let me apologize,” he says. “Please. We don't have to – get real deep right now, but I really need. Q, I need to say it.”

Quentin shrugs with one shoulder. “Given that I'm not mad at you, it really seems like-- you know. We have time.”

Do they? Maybe they do. Of course, maybe that's just an illusion.

“If I hadn't done what I did in Blackspire,” Eliot says, “none of this would've happened to you.”

Quentin puts his hand out. Uncertainly, Eliot takes hold of it, palm to palm, lacing their fingers together. “I would've done the same thing,” Quentin says with a gentle little smile.

Eliot just hangs onto his hand, soaking up Quentin's face and his smile and his forgiveness, until the breakfast tray shows up.

A few days later, Eliot is limping home with the help of a lovely brass-headed cane in one hand and his best girl wrapped around his other arm. He feels ten thousand years old, but still fairly fabulous.

He's not going to die, anyway. Not immediately.

_Home_ is, at present, a reasonably swank loft apartment that Eliot vaguely remembers from – his extended Lost Weekend – and that he thinks belongs to Kady in specific or hedge witches in general or-- Honestly, Eliot has no idea? So technically it's probably not his home, but the view is nice.

He's sharing a room with Margo, and Penny seems to be sleeping with Julia now, and Kady has a room of her own and Alice is stashed on a couch in the library, and Quentin--

“Where do you sleep?” Eliot asks him while Quentin's giving him the grand tour.

“In your room,” he says, and then seems to hear how that sounds out loud. “I mean – the room you're in is – that was mine, but Margo really, um, wanted her own space when she was here, so then I was. Honestly, just, wherever? I don't sleep that much anyway, so I've just been. You know, whatever's free. We've all been busy, so everyone sleeps on weird schedules anyway.”

Eliot nods. It sounds like hell. He gazes out the big windows and he remembers – a bed under the stars. Falling asleep with the scent of wet earth and charred wood, the sound of frogs and crickets.

Of course, this place has abundant, almost lavish amounts of closet space. That's also extremely nice.

He's not inclined to complain either way, really. He's just happy to be here.

They throw Eliot a little party, for lack of a better word. It's not what Eliot thinks of as a party, but not a soul here can cook worth a damn, so they order in a pan of tacos and one of tamales and a sampler box full of cupcakes and armfuls of liquor. There's nothing like a stocked bar here, but there is a blender, so margaritas it is.

It's – nice. Eliot knows it's less to do with him than it is just a badly needed release of tension, but there's loud music and lots of laughter and a few ill-advised homebrew spells being fired off just to see if they work, and for some reason Julia sits in his lap for quite some time earnestly and drunkenly explaining Gnostic theology to him. He should probably take an interest, as someone whose life path seems to involve an untoward number of gods, but the conditions are not optimal for this seminar. He'll have to ask her to revisit the topic when they're both sober.

Quentin dances with Alice. They seem happy, Eliot thinks. He's been here for two days, and he's observed a baffling pattern of long, intense conversations and long, awkward hugs between the two of them, followed by both of them acting guilty. Christ knows what's going on there, but it's probably-- You know, good for Quentin. He's wanted this for so long, and forward motion is forward motion, even if both of them are, god, just embarrassingly slow.

It takes Eliot way too long to get out of his suit at the end of the night; he's just finished hanging it up, and Margo has gone through almost her entire skin-care regimen. “What's the story with Quinn and Q?” he asks, mostly to distract himself from how much it hurts to hobble across one half of a bedroom without his cane. “What did I miss?”

“Oh, fuck me, who knows?” Margo says. “They're making out, they're breaking up, they're breaking up some more. They're breaking up three times, for luck. They're probably going to get married so that they can make out and then cry about it for the rest of their natural lives.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says. “Probably.”

Margo looks over her shoulder, assessing him as he struggles and then collapses into bed. “He's a dickhead,” she says.

“Who?”

“Who? Coldwater.”

“No, he's not,” Eliot says. “Come on. You know better.”

She does, but that doesn't mean she's going to admit to it. “He's a gross bi disaster. He's an embarrasment to the tribe. He's basic.”

Eliot can't help but laugh a little. “He's not any of that. No, okay, he is – a little basic. But he's just. He's trying to figure out the life thing. We all are.”

“You cut him way too much slack,” Margo says. “You should make him....”

When he's pretty sure she's not going to finish that sentence, Eliot says, “That's not how it works.”

“Worked for me,” she says with a feral little grin. Because he's an extremely good friend, Eliot refrains from telling her that it worked for her because nobody else even _wanted_ her dumpy, near-sighted slacker boyfriend, which Eliot literally can't believe is even a _real thing_ , he's still half-sure he's being pranked. He does, however, believe that whatever happened between them happened because Margo laid down the motherfucking law. That would absolutely work on an aimless people-pleaser like Hoberman.

Truthfully, it would probably work on Quentin, too. Eliot just--

Wants to do this like grown-ups this time. Whether it works out or not, he just. Wants to be proud, for once, of the way he handled it.

Quentin is a big maybe in Eliot's life right now, but what Eliot is painfully aware of at this point is that _he_ is the person who's going to have to live with himself, ideally forever. So he'd better get that relationship together before he tries anything fancy.

When Margo gets into bed, she kisses him, and he tries to just – close his eyes and enjoy it. It's still a little confusing and scary, being reminded that he has this body again, that he's responsible for it, but that's not Margo's problem. “You know I have to go back soon,” she says quietly, brushing her fingernails over his eyebrow. “Am I going back alone?”

“I don't know,” he says. “I don't...want you to be alone.”

“But you don't want to go, either,” she says with a sigh. “I know. Well. Stay here, then, if you're going to be a cunt about it.” She's never sounded so gentle with him before, so tolerant of any of his many and varied weaknesses. She must have been really sure he was dead.

“Thought we didn't use _cunt_ as a--”

“In your case it fits,” she says. “You and your. Stupid depth and warmth.”

Eliot laughs and moves his arm around her. The combination hurts so much, and he doesn't care.

What Eliot doesn't see coming is that Alice is going back to Fillory with Margo. “I am technically a queen,” Alice explains as she flips knobs on the espresso machine that only she knows how to work. Guess someone else is going to have to learn now. “I should probably learn how the place works.”

“It doesn't,” Eliot says.

“Don't listen to him, Ponygirl,” Margo says, smacking Alice's ass as she passes by her in the kitchen. “He's just jealous because _some_ people know how to rock a brutal reign of terror, and he's a cheese-eating compromiser whose whole identity is, like, gay and sad like a post-War memoir.”

“I do love cheese,” Eliot says.

“I'm starting to think this is a bad idea,” Alice mumbles.

“It's an amazing idea,” Margo says. “Come on, you have to at least come for long enough to get laid. Eliot's wife is a total closet case, so if you'd like to question your commitment to anxious man-boys who don't give head, now's your chance to broaden the ol' horizons.”

“ _Margo_ ,” Alice squeaks.

“This is a great idea,” Eliot says. “Really. What could go wrong.”

He's just happy to be here. And honestly, he thinks Fillory probably needs an Alice. Nobody else in the royal inner circle is like – a planner. It's probably an unironically good idea.

Before she leaves, Eliot gets a surprisingly unironic long hug from Alice. “I really admire you,” she says when she pulls away, fiddling with her glasses. “I think – you don't think that people do. Admire you. But people do. I do.”

Eliot can't think of a single reason, truthfully, that someone like Alice Quinn would – admire Eliot, but he also can't think of a reason she'd lie. “You just have to be firm with Margo,” he advises her. “She won't listen to you, but secretly she'll respect it. And – be nicer to the talking animals. People forget that a lot. I always had a problem with forgetting that, I wish I'd – been nicer. Also you're going to be tempted to drink the unicorn milk just for the aesthetic, but don't, it's vile.”

“Damn. Magic ruined,” she says, with a lopsided smile and a little sparkle in her eyes that reminds him of-- somebody he can't remember. Somebody he _should_ remember – somebody he loved, he thinks.

Maybe it's a future-memory, from a time down the road when he's had a chance to know Alice better and love her more. That shouldn't make any sense, but Eliot's experienced weirder, so he won't rule it out.

“If you weren't some kind of loser invalid, we could've banged before I left,” Margo says instead of goodbye.

Eliot grins at her and strokes her hair. “Rain check,” he says, even though he sees it in her eyes, the same knowledge he's had for a while now of a part of their life that's over forever. He loves her, she loves him; they'll dine out forever on increasingly exaggerated tales of their youthful debauchery, and then they'll – go home, Eliot guesses.

It feels like something to grieve. But it doesn't feel like something to...undo.

The difference, once you get a feel for it, is everything.

That night Julia and Penny go out on a honest-to-shit date, a dinner-and-a-movie, I-am-not-taking-it-for-granted-that-you'll-bang-me-tonight date. Good for them, they absolutely seem the type. Kady goes out to do – whatever it is that Kady does, and good for her for not telling anybody, not a soul in her life deserves the information. So that just leaves – them. Eliot and Quentin.

They haven't been alone together since that morning in the Brakebills infirmary. Eliot has – really no idea what to expect, and no real agenda of his own. He's playing things by ear. Quentin's right; when the two of them have this much to talk about, it's stupid to expect that it's all going to tumble out in one desperate, adrenaline-filled conversation. They can do this organically. They have time.

Still, Eliot can't help but be encouraged when Quentin brings a bottle of Malbec and two glasses to the sofa where Eliot is listening to a podcast about Anne of Cleves solely because she's his favorite from _Six_. “Quentin Coldwater, are you plying me with alcohol?” he asks, pulling out his earbuds.

“I mean, I'm not not doing that,” Quentin says, pouring the wine. “But it's – pretty much a secondary effect. Mostly this is for my own courage.”

“Aw,” Eliot says, half-sincerely. “You know there's nothing to be nervous about, right? We're – we're good.”

Quentin nods and hands out the wine. Eliot sips it and wonders if he's lying to himself.

Are they good – would this be – good, just like this? If this was the two of them forever? He feels comfortable, sitting in a quiet room alone with Quentin, in a way he's not sure he's ever felt anywhere else. It's not even Eliot's house, but at this particular moment it's his home ground. It's his home because Quentin is with him.

So how would that be, if this was – it? If they picked up the pieces of their lives and went forward from here. If Quentin got married and had kids. If Eliot.... Well, he doesn't really have a plan, but that's actually not a bad thing. If he took his freedom and – played it by ear, if he went out into the world with his pretty face and his sense of style and his magic and his kingly fucking blood and he did _whatever he wanted to do_ , just had ordinary, non-fatal adventures and ordinary, non-shattering love affairs and, he doesn't know, wrote a fucking memoir or something, and blew through a couple of times a year to make Margo throw him a ball at Whitespire or to shower presents on Quentin's adorable babies in New Jersey....

What would that be like? Good?

It might be. It would certainly have its charms.

It's not Plan A. But Eliot thinks.... He's just so happy to be here – in his body, in his world, in his life, cared for and admired by these friends of his who punched the world into submission to bring him home. With his whole life ahead of him. Eliot can be petty as shit, but he doesn't know what he could possibly do with a gratitude this big, other than make the very best of whatever happens now.

“Can I do something weird?” Quentin says, breaking into Eliot's reverie.

“Oh, I hope you do,” Eliot says, fully sincere this time. “I'm intrigued already.”

Quentin lies down with his head on Eliot's thigh. Eliot flips his tie over his shoulder so it's not dangling in Quentin's face, and he rests his hand on Quentin's arm. “Are you – sad about Alice going?”

“No,” Quentin says. “No, I think we – figured a lot of stuff out, these past couple of weeks. We're okay. I mean, we'll always care about each other, but we don't really – want the same kind of relationship? And that's fine. You know, you can love someone so much and still not want to be a couple with them.”

“Can you really?” Eliot says mildly. “Fascinating.”

Quentin chuckles. “Okay, yeah, you figured that out about a hundred years before I did. And I've been – wow, okay, I guess we're doing this?” Are they? Before Eliot can ask for some clarification and maybe a consent-talk, Quentin plunges on. “I always kind of took it personally, you – you not wanting to be like – coupled-up with me in a way that, that I felt like was normal, and I. I wasn't hearing you, all the times you tried to tell me that you loved me in your own way. I was pushy and – and needy, and. I didn't listen to you, and I'm so fucking sorry if that ever – created distance between us.”

“That's not.” Not the conversation Eliot had been preparing for, so he guesses he gets to start that adventuresome, unplanned existence right the hell now. “Okay, I. Have not always been as straightforward about – what I did or did not want as that implies. In fact, you – should not listen to me, you should probably – never listen to me, because I. Lie. I lie all the time, to everyone, definitely including myself. Actually, probably...mostly to myself.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, suddenly sounding a little off-book himself. “Well, that's. I think a lot of people do that.”

“Oh, don't diminish my accomplishments, darling,” Eliot says. “I lie with a scope and grandeur that few can achieve in their wildest dreams.”

There's a moment of silence, long enough for Eliot to reproach himself for his tone. Why does he sound so goddamn _flippant_ all the time, even when he's trying to – when he wants someone to know he means it? What good is a costume if you never take it off? What's the difference between being a work of art and a goddamn liar if you're Eliot Waugh? “It's been a long time since you called me that,” Quentin says at last.

Eliot closes his eyes. Guess they're doing this. “It was me,” he says. “I created the distance. I should've-- Maybe I wasn't ready yet, maybe I was still – a little confused about everything, but I shouldn't have let you go the way I did. I broke us.”

“No--” Quentin begins, the darling.

“Yes,” Eliot says. “I did. People – people get a lifetime together, if they're lucky. We got one, and then you turned around and told me you'd want to do it all again, and that was. Too much, I couldn't – believe you, I couldn't. See myself that way. As someone you'd – keep. On purpose. It was easier to think you were the one who was confused, that you were deluded. That makes more sense to me, that feels – like who I am. I broke us because broken felt like the right ending. I broke us because I just – break things, I guess. And you fix them. And I don't deserve you, and I've never wanted anything more than I want to be your stupid coupled-up _boyfriend_ in the most annoying, heteronormative way possible, and you were right, we had that and we could've had it again, but I fucked it up, I pushed you away, and I'm so sorry, Q. I'll be sorry for the rest of my life.”

Fuck. Of course he's crying. Margo's right, gay misery is just his whole fucking aesthetic now and it's _deplorable_ , he's the worst kind of cliché.

He can feel Quentin sit up, kneeling on the couch beside Eliot. He can feel Quentin's fingers stroke over his scratchy, unshaven jaw. “I hope that last part's not true,” Quentin says. “That's – a really shit way to spend your life.”

“No, it's – of course it's not true,” Eliot says, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye. “I won't-- I'll be okay. Whatever – whatever point we get to, I know it's. Making mistakes is just, just part of figuring life out, right?” It won't always hurt like this. Eliot knows that. He's not thirteen years old scribbling theatrical tragedy into his fucking diary.

He won't always be sorry. He'll grieve the time they lost, and then he'll. Be grateful that they have each other now, however they have each other.

“Can I kiss you?” Quentin says, and that's so much that Eliot almost says _no_ , almost thinks that he's going to need to cry a little longer before he's sane enough to make choices.

But only almost, because Eliot's not a complete idiot.

They kiss and kiss, sloppy and stupid, hands all up in each other's way, and Eliot keeps crying, and it feels like a million missing memories, the unfamiliar taste and texture of Quentin's lips, but also the _feeling_ of it, the comfort and trust and the fulfillment, which Eliot's never had in this life but he knows in his bones. It feels exactly like Eliot somehow knew that being loved feels.

“I love you,” Quentin says, and Eliot comes _this close_ to saying I know, but not to be a smartass, he just – he _knows_. He's felt this before. He knows.

“I love you, too,” he says. “Q, I always have.” Quentin whimpers a little and presses his face against Eliot's cheek. Eliot curls his hand behind Quentin's neck and hangs on. “Just tell me what you want,” he says. He hadn't planned this part either, but it comes out so easily now that he's on the good stuff, now that he's high, high, high. “You want to go on dates? Boat quest? You want to buy a house? I don't fucking care, just – I want to go wherever you go, just tell me where.”

“That last one,” Quentin laughs. “Yeah, I. I want to buy a house, El, I want to live with you and have babies with you, I want to do it all over again. I want us to be stupid, suburban lawnmower queers with opinions about gardening, and I want to have lights in the backyard and a picnic table and – parties, I want all our friends to come over, and you can grill for them and make wine in the basement, and I want to grow my beard back and probably get a dog or something, I don't know, I haven't really thought it through that much.”

“Liar,” Eliot laughs into his hair.

Quentin laughs back, his fingers curling into the sleeves of Eliot's shirt. “I don't have strong feelings about the dog,” he says.

“We'll call that one a maybe,” Eliot says.

Quentin pulls back to look at him. Eliot must look like a total mess, but the version of himself he sees reflected in Quentin's eyes is – unrecognizable – happy, and worthy. Eliot wants to be that person so badly. He figures – who can teach him that, if not Quentin? “And we're calling the rest of it...?” Quentin prompts.

“Yes,” Eliot says, pulling Quentin's lips back toward his. “It's yes, it's all yes, darling, anything you want.”

They have so many years left to fine-tune the details, they don't have to work it all out right this minute. They have _time_ , what feels like infinite time. They have their whole, infinitely beautiful lives to get this right.


End file.
